by Agata Ferretti
This week, Planned Parenthood shot into the spotlight to become one of the most scrutinized groups in America. On July 14th 2015, the anti-abortion group The Center for Medical Progress posted a long version of a conversation between a Planned Parenthood executive and undercover actors on YouTube about the “special methods” used by the Planned Parenthood Company to abort babies without “crushing” them, in order for their …

by Remy Servis
UN Mission for Ebola Emergency Response (UNMEER) is the first-ever UN emergency health mission. It was assembled in mid-September 2014 in response to the growing Ebola outbreak in West Africa. The mission’s main objectives were to help treat those already infected (by providing medical, financial, and administrative support to countries in need), and to help prevent further outbreaks from occurring. By setting (and subsequently meeting) monthly goals for …

By Marc Beuttler

In a presentation to the UN Human Rights Council, the outgoing UN Special Rapporteur on trafficking in persons, Joy Ngozi Ezeilo, highlighted the lack of adequate knowledge of human trafficking for removal of organs. Human trafficking is a vast and dirty industry that generates more than $51 billion dollars annually. This large profit is perhaps due to the increased scope of trafficking in women, men, boys and girls, …

By Chiru Murage

Increasing medical advances have an unforeseen consequence: the supply for organ donations is increasingly outrunning the demand. In this article, Wesley J. Smith discusses a new and contested idea that would hypothetically increase the number of organ donations.
This idea has surfaced in Clinical Ethics (201 3 Volume 8 Number I) in which it is proposed that awake and conscious ICU patients are asked to harvest organs, as opposed …

By Noushaba T. Rashid

Human organs don’t smell that bad in Ukraine Militia from Slavyansk found hundreds of National Guard soldiers’ corpses during a night reconnaissance operation according to many social media outlets recently. These soldiers appeared to have their stomachs ripped open and had their organs removed. In addition this horrifying discovery, many living in this region of high conflict have seen armored and special vehicles, ambulances and armored cash …

By Evangelia Lazaris

Jacquelyn Shaw is writing in response to Dr. Stephen Beed’s concerns about previous comments made on presumed consent and organ donation. She argues that the quality of brain death determination goes hand-in-hand with the quality of the tests used to confirm brain death. Though Beed supports the brain death tests that, since 2003, have been adopted across Canada, Shaw states that these tests are, in fact, unsafe and …

By Jake Stern

Scientists at the University of Missouri in Columbia have successfully implanted human stem cells into genetically modified pigs with compromised immune systems, paving the way for future advances in research using non-human animal subjects. In the past, stem cell research has been constrained by cell rejection, which is caused by the significant differences between the immune systems of the animal subjects (for example, mice) and human patients. However, …

By Marc Beuttler

The Obama administration has decided not to revoke an insurance coverage mandate for transplant recipients. The life-preserving medication these patients require can cost more than $2,000 a month, and if the proposal to relax insurance coverage for transplant recipients had been adopted, drug costs would have jumped for vulnerable populations.
Many people already cannot afford what they currently pay for life-preserving drugs. Since 2006, a federal guarantee requires all …

By Jake Stern

Over the past two weeks in Nepal, fifteen organ traffickers have been arrested and charged with illegal kidney trafficking. The growing demand and dwindling supply of kidneys has forced many poor individuals in the country to rely on the illegal organ trade. Involvement in trafficking organs is punishable by up to 10 years in jail and a fine of 7,000 dollars. The trade is so popular in the …

By Abrigul Lutfalieva

Johns Hopkins University researchers created a three-dimensional complement of human retinal tissue in the laboratory, which includes functioning photoreceptor cells capable of responding to light, the first step in the process of converting it into visual images.
The study leader M. Valeria Canto-Soler, Ph.D., an assistant professor of ophthalmology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine mentioned that:”We have basically created a miniature human retina in a dish …